Guardian. Guardian: “Outliners force us into a way of thinking that is actively inimical to creativity.”
[Scripting News]
Yet another boring screed about the evils of Powerpoint launched off the fact the Colin Powell used it to organize his briefing to the UN.
First, I have yet to meet anyone who has ever used one of the stupid Autocontent Wizards provided with Powerpoint. Second, if there is one positive feature to Powerpoint it is the outliner.
The issue is not a problem with Powerpoint. It is a problem with too few people who know how to use an outline as a thinking tool. Which has absolutely nothing to do with how most of us learned about outlines back in the fourth grade. For any argument or story longer than a paragraph there needs to be some structure of ideas, assertions, evidence, inferences, and conclusions. That structure is rarely a simple linear flow (ever listen to a toddler tell you about their day?). Finding that structure is an iterative effort of arranging and rearranging materials until the story works. Outlines are a tool for doing just that. One of the best innovations in PC software was making outlines something whose structure you could manipulate.
One of my favorite tools from the early days of the PC was Thinktank. It, along with its descendants, let you focus on manipulating the structure of your thinking instead of the form. The flaw of WYSIWYG tools like Word and Powerpoint is that they bury the important tools like the outliner underneath the fa ade of pretty fonts, justified text, and multi-column layouts.
Do you ever wonder what would have happened if word processors had focused more on helping the hard part of writing (thinking and organizing ideas) and less on the last 5% (making things look nice for management)? Remember that the early generation word processors were designed to improve the productivity in typing departments not the work of writers. To what extent does that bias remain embedded in the foundations of the products?